Appendix:Swadesh lists

Swadesh lists were originally devised by the linguist Morris Swadesh. In the 1940s to 1950s, Swadesh developed word lists of body parts, verbs, natural phenomena, in order to compute the relationships of languages, and in particular their age, by a method called glottochronology. However, for most linguists this method is even more unreliable than lexicostatistics.

A Swadesh list may also be useful to achieve knowledge of some universal terms in other languages. This is because, for basic communication, knowledge of vocabulary is more important than knowledge of grammar and syntax. Sometimes it is even possible to achieve (very) basic communication skills with no knowledge of the target language syntax whatsoever.

To sort the table columns here (or for any other table in any HTML page), copy the javascript link from here (control-click the "sort table" link to copy the link) and once you have come back to this page, paste the javascript code you have copied into your URL window and run it. (The other table scripts there can also be used here.) Alternatively, instead of copying the link, you could drag it into your bookmarks toolbar, allowing the link to be accessible in the future from the toolbar. This sorting feature could be particularly useful if and when the categories of the Swadesh template and/or Basic English template are fleshed out.

For a basis to expand this list into other languages see the basic 207-word Swadesh template. See also this Swadesh template containing a comparative table for 8 different languages, and this Swadesh template with categories and parts-of-speech added. To visit a more extensive list of basic words in various languages (not a Swadesh list, though it includes and is cross-referenced to Swadesh words), see the Basic English word list.

The words from Swadesh's original 100-word list are designated by an asterisk (*). In the composite list on this page, there are actually 207 words, since seven of the words in the 100-word list (breast, fingernail, full, horn, knee, moon, round) were not in the original 200-word list.

Numbers in Over 5000 Languages (Scope-wise, probably the best multi-language site. This is the only database on the Internet with nearly all the world's languages in it; however, it only has the numerals 1-10.)